The French Lieutenant's Woman is poised to tackle the Iron Lady in a dramatisation of the 17 days leading up to the 1982 Falklands War, the Hollywood Reporter suggests.
Meryl Streep is "in talks" to play Margaret Thatcher in the Film4/Pathe* collaboration, dubbed Thatcher, with Jim Broadbent also discussing the possibility of …

Actually also...

I was chatting to an ex-USN officer a couple of years ago who distinctly remembers intense gunnery drill as his ship sailed with some alacrity in the general direction of the Falklands in May 1982. That they turned around before they arrived at their ordered destination was primarily due to the rapid conclusion of the land battle.

Casting

Benicio del Toro as Pinochet? I reckon not. Philipe Noiret would have been a shoo-in for the role, had he not preceded the dictator to the grave by a fortnight or so. A nice irony too, given Noiret played Neruda in Il Postino.

Comedy?

I don't know why people think it should be a comedy. There was nothing amusing about trying to run a business during the Friedmanite hag's economic experiment. I didn't notice people laughing when their mortgage payments doubled and then doubled again within a few months, or when unemployment ramped up to several million. Export industries weren't rolling in the aisles while she held the pound at $2.40 and made it impossible to sell anything overseas. I imagine the banks didn't chuckle either, with the numbers of people just abandoning their homes, though the fly builders probably grinned as they looted newly-foreclosed properties and ripped the bathroom fittings out. Even, I would think, genuine Friedmanites would pause at the way this supposed small-government conservative left office with the total tax burden, as a percent of GNP, several points higher than when she came in.

I hope the movie is a serious hatchet job, as serious as the hatchet job she did on the British economy. It needs to be recorded for posterity. It might help prevent the greater tragedy of a new generation of since-borns picking up the right-wing nostalgia and ignorantly repeating the same mistakes.

I'm guessing you're not a fan then :-)

Re: I'm guessing you're not a fan then :-)

That would put me in the large majority, then. At the time General Galtieri saved her ass, Thatcher and her government were enjoying the lowest approval ratings (25% and 18% respectively) since opinion polls began. The wave of jingoism that is presumably the subject of this film pushed her up enough to win the next election, but she was ignominiously sacked by her own party to avoid a Tory holocaust in the one after.

@PT

"The wave of jingoism that is presumably the subject of this film pushed her up enough to win the next election, but she was ignominiously sacked by her own party to avoid a Tory holocaust in the one after."

Interesting - according to you we had a parliament that lasted without a general election for 9 years from 1983 to 1992. The "next election" (the one after the Falklands war) was in 1983, Thatcher stood down 7 years after that (in 1990), and the election following that - the first one in which she didn't lead the Tories - was in 1992. But it was not possible for a parliament to last for more than 5 years without a general election.

Your idiotic rants might carry a bit more weight if you bothered to check your facts before spewing out your drivel. It is quite clear from the dates quoted above that there must have been a general election some time in 1987 or 1988 (in fact it was in 1988) and that far from being as you claim sacked by her own party to avoid defeat in that election she led the party to victory in it.